TBC Flashback - "Head, Heart, and Briefcase" (Sept '21)

Ever wonder why someone with a stellar resume struggles in their new role? Or why another employee with modest credentials becomes your top performer? The answer lies in understanding that people are more than their professional history.

The Bosshole Chronicles takes you on a journey through the powerful "Head, Heart, and Briefcase" model—a framework that transforms how leaders view, select, and develop their team members. This flashback episode unpacks the whole person approach to talent optimization that can keep you firmly out of The Bosshole Zone.

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Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com.  We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics.  Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience.  Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0.  RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform.  RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing TBC Flashback Episode
• 1:39 The Head, Heart and Briefcase Model
• 3:04 Why Resumes Poorly Predict Performance
• 6:42 What Lives in the Heart
• 9:31 The Head: Behavioral Drives & Cognitive Ability
• 14:10 Succession Planning with the Whole Person
• 21:50 Applying the Model in Leadership Development

Transcript

John Broer: 0:08

All right, folks, we're introducing a new type of episode for The Bossh ole Chronicles. We're calling it a TBC that stands for The Bossh ole Chronicles, a TBC flashback of an episode we dropped a couple of years ago about head, heart and briefcase. Head, heart and briefcase is our terminology for what we call the whole person model.

John Broer: 0:32

Managers, supervisors, cannot look at one single aspect of an individual. A lot of times it's just the performance, or it's a person's resume, or, as we call it, the briefcase. No, you have to look at the whole person head, heart and briefcase and the behavioral and cognitive data that we get from our platform that lives in the head, but that only tells part of the story. So if you are looking to stay out of the boss hole zone and understand the best way to develop, guide and grow your direct reports, you've got to understand the whole person model. And so here's a little flashback of an episode we dropped a few years ago about Head, heart and Briefcase. The Bossh ole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode.

Sara Best: 1:39

Welcome back to The Bossh ole Chronicles. Everybody, it's great to be with you. I am your co-host, Sara Best, and we are here today because we never want to waste a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss. Today, I'm joined, as always, by my ever-fabulous co-host and brofessor.

John Broer: 1:59

Mr John Broer. Good morning, John, how are you? I'm good, sarah, good to see you, as always. How are you?

Sara Best: 2:03

I'm doing great. I think the topic, the subject matter for today is simple yet powerful. And with that, John, I'm going to toss it right over to you to tell us about our subject for today's episode.

John Broer: 2:17

All right, happy to do that, and this is in keeping with some of our real core tools and elements that we use when we're working with clients. But today we're going to talk about the head, the heart and the briefcase. And the head, heart and briefcase is the way we look at people relative to what they bring to an organization, to a relationship and so forth, and we have a really cool illustration of this and, as a matter of fact, we'll put this in the show notes so you can just take a look at it. But whenever we start to think about a person and perhaps their fit and optimization within an organization, we encourage our clients to think about the head, the heart and the briefcase, and we'll actually start with the briefcase. Okay, so with the briefcase, this is our reference, or how we refer to a person's resume, their credentials, their KSAs, knowledge, skills, abilities. These are the things that they put down in a job application or they have on their resume to let us know what they've done in the past. Now, the interesting thing about the briefcase is that it's typically the primary variable that organizations consider when hiring and recruiting and selecting somebody for a particular position.

John Broer: 3:38

Now, the one thing that we always like to advise our clients to consider is that, while it does give an indication of a person's past experience and may indicate perhaps minimum qualifications that they have to have for a position, the briefcase actually is a really poor predictor of future performance.

John Broer: 3:58

And whenever we say that we'll get a lot of, sometimes we'll get some pushback, sarah. I mean you know the clients will say what are you talking about? I mean, this tells us what they've done in the past and I said that's true, but there is no correlation to how they will actually perform in the future. It just simply lets you know what they've done in the past. What we advise clients to do is use that to establish minimum qualifications, sort of a threshold. In other words, in order to be in this role in our company, you have to have these minimum qualifications. Now, maybe it's a certification level of education, licensure of some sort, but that's it, because once they hit that level the way our analytics platform is built then anybody who hits the minimum qualifications, we want to administer the behavioral assessment and perhaps, depending on the position, also the cognitive assessment. But it only tells us what a person has done in the past and is not a good predictor of future performance.

Sara Best: 5:08

I'm going to add to what you're saying, john, about the briefcase. You know that it's past experience. Let's be honest If you're a hiring manager, if you've ever had to be responsible for making that decision that someone should work for your company or not, you're probably like me, where you're saying a little prayer Like man, I hope that person's experience, which looks really good like they did all this stuff.

Sara Best: 5:30

I hope they can do that here, like that's what we need them to come and do that here. We can begin to see how faulty that thinking is, and if you've ever created your own resume, you can appreciate and understand that how those skills and experiences are represented is a matter of wording. Basically, there's no way that we can translate over to the current environment things that are represented on a piece of paper, even talked about in an interview. So I just wanted to highlight that, john.

John Broer: 5:59

Let's be honest. Oh, I think that's critical and, yeah, hope is not a strategy in any realm, by the way. But you're right and I think that if we are using the resume as a means of filtering people and we are lookingatical errors, that's going to reflect poorly on the candidate. However, to your point, it is literally a guessing game if that's the only element or that's the only variable you're considering at that point. So, as we said, there are three of them. So that's the briefcase. Sarah, tell us a little bit about the heart.

Sara Best: 6:42

Well, in the heart, John, are the things that we are passionate about, the things that we value, our beliefs. I'd also say that it's, you know, kind of like our emotional intelligence. It's the things that we are willing to adapt. But in the heart, you know, things like values, passions, interests, much like the briefcase, John. These things will change throughout our lifetime. You know, as we mature, as we experience a lot of different things.

Sara Best: 7:11

Gosh, I mean the last year and a half to 18 months, how many people's perspectives and even their philosophies have changed as a result of a pandemic. So we would appreciate that the values and the interests have to be considered when selecting somebody. They may or may not be aligned with the organizational values, but more than anything, they're very personal and they need to be acknowledged because they're part of that whole person. We would suggest, too, that the heart and the briefcase, those things are not static. They do change. You know, we put new tools in our briefcase, we take some tools out. I just think about my career. Some of the certifications and the work that I did early in my career have lapsed and expired and I won't ever use those again, but they were part of the briefcase back at a time, and now I have different credentials and different focus, so appreciating that those are representative of the chapters that we're in in our career and in our life.

John Broer: 8:10

Somebody asked me the you know when I've made this or shared this explanation with them. They said, well, I don't think my core values have changed you know that much in my lifetime. And I said, okay, I will acknowledge that. But they've evolved. You know so at my age now, with adult sons and I mean you have adult children as well the perspective and your view on life evolves over time. It does, and we still have our core values. However, they're just not stable and therefore are not a good representative predictor of future performance for sure.

John Broer: 8:45

Now they're critical. They're part of the whole person. And the other thing that I think is really interesting about the heart is that people will say well, how on earth do you even understand that about a person? Well, organizations that have good behavioral-based interview processes in other words, they train their hiring managers and the people that are doing the recruiting and the interviewing and help them understand what is behavioral-based interviewing and what is behavioral-based interviewing really can reveal an element of a person's heart and where they are on their core values and interests and gifting and passions. So don't let that slip away. That's a critical part of it, but, like you said, it changes over time.

Sara Best: 9:25

It does so, john, the part that doesn't really change a whole lot for our lifetime is what's comprised in the head. Why don't you unpack that for us?

John Broer: 9:34

Okay, in the head. This is where our work actually resides. Within the PI platform, we have a couple of our core assessments the behavioral assessment and the cognitive assessment and it measures specifically what's in a person's head, their natural behavioral drives and factor combinations which they've had since they were eight to 10 years old, as well as a person's general cognitive ability, and we'll talk about those separately. Let's start with a person's natural drives. So your natural behavioral drives have been in place since you were eight to 10 years old, and because we can measure them and realize that our analytics and our science, our highly validated science, goes all the way back to the 1950s Actually it is before the 1950s in the work that Arnold Daniels was doing in the 1940s. However, because your behavioral drives are established at such a young age, they are a great predictor of who you are now and therefore, because we can measure it, it helps us to prescribe optimization of a role that you can have within an organization. So a person's natural behavioral drives shows up and you've heard this in the podcast as one of 17 reference profiles, and then we can dig even deeper into that and understand the unique nature of a person's behavioral tendencies and their behavioral DNA. So the other side of that is general cognitive ability and that's the cognitive assessment in our platform. So a simple way of understanding general cognitive ability.

John Broer: 11:04

It is related to IQ, but it's not the same thing. What it is is it's the ability to measure a person's capacity to deal with complexity. That's what general cognitive ability is and, by the way, it is regarded as the best predictor of future performance far and away. So when you combine the alignment of a person's general cognitive ability with a cognitive match for a particular job or role and their behavioral DNA, you get those two things together. It is an incredibly powerful predictor of future performance. Now, we always advise our clients. You know our analytics are just one part of a larger recruiting and selection and succession planning sort of process. You never just want to use one data point as the determinant for whether you're going to hire somebody or let somebody go. You never want to do that. But this data is so relevant and so powerful. It is, at the, at its very core, the tool that we use to help optimize fit within an organization and then help people grow and evolve and, you know, just become better versions of who they are.

Sara Best: 12:24

Well, and to that point, John, you know we're talking about recruitment and selection of employees, and Predictive Index is, in fact, one of the few validated tools that is compliant with the law and able to be used as a recruitment and selection tool. Part of that is because it's a free choice assessment. It is designed to remove bias, that you know. So compliance with anti-discrimination laws, the repeated validity of the assessment, you know all comes into play. I think what I love most about this idea of the head, the heart and the briefcase is, you know, yes, we want to consider their past experiences, we want to consider what they value, what individuals believe in, what they're passionate about. Those things are really relevant and important.

Sara Best: 13:14

But more than that, it's this idea of how is this person going to do the work, how are they naturally wired to do the work? Does it fit with what we expect of this role? And unmet expectations, I think, are the bane of manager's existence, if you will. The problem is we don't establish those expectations up front. Therefore, we don't exactly know what to measure against. But the head, the heart and the briefcase create such a great frame to do that better, to do it less subjectively and to do it in honor of and with respect to setting a person up for success. Because, john, you know what is often said and you're going to unveil that little couple of statements we always say around the head, the heart and the briefcase.

John Broer: 14:00

Absolutely, absolutely, and this is so true. People are hired for what they know and they're fired for who they are.

Sara Best: 14:07

Yes.

John Broer: 14:08

And I would even say it is true.

Sara Best: 14:10

I always go a step further to say you may not have been fired. I was never fired from a job, but I definitely found myself ill fit for the expectations that a manager had of me and able to move on from that particular function because there was quite a bit of suffering and agony around misaligned expectations and what was perceived as poor performance.

John Broer: 14:33

Oh, absolutely yeah. So go ahead and substitute fired for ill fit, disengaged, unhappy, unmotivated misalignment or sub-optimization when we do not apply the framework of talent optimization, which is another episode. So if you're listening to this, go back, and if you haven't listened to the talent optimization episode, make sure you do. But that is that's what this is all about, and you know what. There's some interesting traps that our clients have gotten into that we've helped to correct. Sarah, and your comments make me think about this.

John Broer: 15:06

For example, we've had a couple of clients that have said well, in terms of general cognitive ability, this person is. Well, they're an attorney or they have an MBA. That has no bearing on general cognitive ability. That's a briefcase thing. So, just because somebody and this isn't, I'm not discrediting anybody that has an advanced degree of any kind, but it doesn't reflect general cognitive ability. General cognitive ability is a person's capacity to deal with complexity. So you could have a PhD and still have a moderate amount of capacity to deal with complexity. Critical that people mistake what really is more of a briefcase characteristic and misplace it and say, oh, they've got to be incredibly smart. Well, I'm not saying they're not smart. Smart and cognitive ability are two different things.

Sara Best: 16:05

Well, smart does not equal accomplished either. Exactly, I think, what you're saying. The other important point to note about the cognitive assessment is, with many of the clients that we work with there's a hesitation to use the cognitive assessment, and it's understandable. They don't want the information to be misused. I would suggest that cognitive ability tests, you know to be in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and all the things that govern how we select candidates. You know there has to be appropriate accommodation and it has to be validated to the point where it is not diagnostic.

Sara Best: 16:45

The cognitive assessment, you know it's important to at least understand and set a target for the complexity of any particular role. So that's another place where I think organizations could spend a little more time thinking about. You know how fast-paced is the work, how complex, how much change is going to be relative to this position or frequent in this position, and you know if we're picking a candidate who has a high degree of stability and a need for consistency, but we're putting them in an environment that's very what's the word? John, john.

John Broer: 17:19

Chaotic.

Sara Best: 17:19

Maryam Very chaotic and fast-paced and lots of things happening at once.

John Broer: 17:24

John Right.

Sara Best: 17:24

Maryam so that cognitive expectation being set in advance really does then further the clarity in the selection process and give that candidate a better opportunity, you know, for success.

John Broer: 17:37

We actually had a couple of examples One that I'm thinking of right now, where we had a group of regional managers and actually their behavioral alignment to the target was great, absolutely great, and these, these were a dozen really solid performers in the organization. And then the organization was magnified. The complexity of the position itself, I mean. They literally changed the role to where it was far more complex and almost immediately they saw a third of those folks. They excelled, they had no problem dealing with it. They had about another third that were just keeping pace with what's necessary.

John Broer: 18:16

And then there was another third that was struggling. I mean, they were falling far behind and they asked me they said, well, maybe we just need to get rid of them. I said whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second, you're the ones that made the change. You changed the complexity of the role and actually we had some people falling behind. Well, what does that tell us? That means that perhaps we provide additional support, or maybe there was additional training or time that is necessary to get them up to competence or a level of competency to be able to do the job. However, there's always going to be. If you continue to accelerate complexity, you're always going to have that gap and that just is information that helps us manage and optimize our people more effectively.

Sara Best: 19:07

So no, I think that's all really Sure and I know in our work recently we have had some success in building a succession plan inside a pretty fast-paced organization, but the plan encompasses the data matching and aligning internal candidates with, you know, respective leadership roles and high-level leadership roles at that, and actually having some runway. The one thing I appreciate most about how this organization is approaching succession is they're starting a few years back.

Sara Best: 19:54

They're anticipating the change that's coming, especially on their executive leadership team, and are deploying, you know, the behavioral and the cognitive assessment to help better assess and develop the candidates who are most appropriate for those leadership roles. I wanted to share, too, a great example. We're doing a leadership academy. It's funded by a grant and it's a collection of nominated and sort of hand-selected emerging leaders that work in a specific industry with a specific focus, and the head, the heart and the briefcase has been the framework for which each candidate in this leadership program has been asked to design a project. So there's a lot of latitude they're given, given head, heart, briefcase In the head kind of projects, we're seeing people really find ways to get learning, to adjust their pace of work appropriately, learning to respect and appreciate the team they have to lead and then also adjusting their expectations of those people, kind of getting outside of their own drives and better adapting or kind of adopting this notion of how can I optimize my direct reports. That's an example of of a head project.

Sara Best: 21:24

In the heart, you know, we've got people who are really working hard to use the skills of emotional intelligence. They're building self-regard. For example, in this particular group there's a number of people that have very low self-regard. They have high degrees of empathy, so they're very tuned in to the work they're doing and the clients they serve. Yet on the inside there's not a lot of gas in the tank around appreciating self and strengths. So we always talk about how you can't give away what you don't have, and so adjusting and building that sense of self so that it's equivalent to the empathy makes them a much more impactful practitioner. That's a heart project. And then the briefcase holy cow. They're being so creative, the members of this cohort to design ways to achieve additional certification, even ways to take the learning that PI and EI have given them, so that they can build a project or build a process or initiative inside their organization. So I thought that was an interesting framework and I think it's applicable, you know, to a lot of different things that we're doing inside our organizations.

John Broer: 22:33

No question, and I think you have just let our listeners know that the thing you really need to take away from this episode is that the whole person shows up.

John Broer: 22:42

That's right you know you can't separate, you know, head, heart and briefcase from the others. It's the whole person and that's why, when we are considering whether it's somebody from outside the organization bringing them in or, to your point, the people that are already here, how do we help them grow, how do we optimize them? We have to think about the head, the heart and the briefcase, because they all go together. Great example, sarah. That's awesome.

Sara Best: 23:07

Yep and John, great topic today. Thank you for your time and thanks to our listeners. Don't forget to check the show notes If you want an opportunity to take the PI and get your reference profile so you can begin really digging into this more fully for yourself. The head, the heart and the briefcase, john. What do our listeners need to do?

John Broer: 23:26

Just go into the show notes. You'll see a link to get your reference profile. Just go ahead and do that. We turn those around pretty quickly. By the way, if anybody has any questions about it, you can always reach out to us at info at realgoodventurescom.

Sara Best: 23:42

Thanks, take care, bye-bye.

John Broer: 23:51

Thanks very much for checking out this episode of the Boss Hole Chronicles. It was so good to have you here, and if you have your own boss hole story that you want to share with the Boss Hole Transformation Nation, just reach out. You can email us at my story at the boss hole chronicles dot com. Again, my story at the boss hole chronicles dot com. We'll see you next time.